Coriolanus and Hazlitt again

This follows my last but one posting. Uttara Natarajan has kindly let me see her paper, which is part of a chapter that will appear in July in a Continuum volume in their Great Shakespearean series.

It seems Hazlitt published the same argument only one week later and in that version it’s quite clear that it’s a specific attack, on the ‘Modern Poets’, namely Coleridge, Wordworth and Southey, and Wordsworth in particular for his shameful commemoration ode celebrating the reactionary ruling power and the slaughter at Waterloo. In this case poetry clearly is siding with tyranny, but while imagination is certainly drawn to the fearful, vast and awesome, so it can be to the good, and there is no reason why poetry should always make the oppressor the more impressive and sympathetic. In King Lear, indeed, the good is as potent as the evil.

That’s the argument and Uttara’s case seems convincing.

The point that’s of educational relevance, however, remains-- and it’s not Uttara’s purpose in her chapter to address it. If Imagination is so drawn to what impresses the emotions, and poetry is the faculty of imagination, then isn’t the other faculty, that of understanding, left at a serious disadvantage? And isn’t this a worry for education?

What is there to animate the activity of the head and understanding that is comparable to that poetry that sets the heart on fire?

Coriolanus and curriculum

Hazlitt, in his essay on Coriolanus, writes about imagination, the faculty that makes poetry, and understanding, that that informs analytical and deliberative prose, as follows:

The imagination is an exaggerating and exclusive faculty: it takes from one thing to add to another: it accumulates circumstances together to give the greatest possible effect to a favourite object. The understanding is a dividing and measuring faculty: it judges of things, not according to their immediate impression on the mind, but according to their relations to one another. The one is a monopolizing faculty, which seeks the greatest quantity of present excitement by inequality and disproportion; the other is a distributive faculty, which seeks the greatest quantity of ultimate good, by justice and proportion.

If this is right, it needs to appear in a theory for English. It implies that any hope in the curriculum of integrating the experience of literature with the study of history or sociology in schemes of single-subject ‘humanities’ is doomed to failure, if the integration is to be one of substance and not just of timetabling. If education is primarily about the Enlightenment concerns with understanding, knowledge and reason, then any intense exposure to literature, or at any rate poetry, would seem to work against education’s purpose.

But surely Hazlitt’s wrong?

Well, note how he goes on:

The one is an aristocratical, the other a republican faculty.

HIs reason for bringing up the distinction between imagination and understanding in an essay on Coriolanus is that Shakespeare’s poetry all goes to the ‘aristocratical’ Coriolanus and none to the people in its democratic, undifferentiated mass, and that that’s in the nature of poetry.

On Saturday there was the tenth annual Hazlitt Study Day in Oxford. Uttara Natarajan’s opening lecture addressed this issue by suggesting, on the basis of related writings by Hazlitt, that his point wasn’t general but was meant to relate only to the specific context of this play. But her talk was so interesting that I constantly set me off thinking, so I kept finding I’d missed key things she said.

If I can get the written version I'll come back to the issue again.

"What is English?"

Just got an email from a student at the Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont inviting me to contribute a brief statement on ‘What is English?’, for some documentary she’s making. I dashed off the following. It doesn’t fulfil the brief but gives expression to stuff I've been thinking and reading recently.

English teaching in its essentials went on before there was any such subject. At Hawkshead Grammar School in the 1780s Wordsworth’s teachers of classics, maths, science, whatever, put books his way — often their own precious copies -- and especially contemporary poetry; they encouraged his own poetry writing and provided a good library. William Hazlitt arriving at Hackney (Dissenting) Academy a few years later and at about the same age, failing to submit a written assignment and under questioning from his teacher, explained that he was already writing his own substantial essay on the foundations of moral life and was invited to continue that and skip the official assignments, simply showing his drafts every so often. The point is, ‘English’ in each case recognised and supported a basic need to explore thoughts and ideas and to find a voice.

English essentially recognises what should be, could be and often is going on anyway: discovering literature (broadly defined) and having recourse to writing and talking as means of discovering and exploring ideas, of understanding the world and of finding and making expressions of one’s experience of it. In the 19th century plenty of working people made their own breakthrough into such an intellectual life, but English teachers can promote it (when they’re not preventing it). At best they lead students to possibilities, helping them get better at literate pursuits and engage with the society’s public discourses.

English belongs in the Enlightenment project — the Enlightenment as in Locke, Hume and Adam Smith and not Bentham, and as broadened by Romanticism to encompass imagination.